Everyday Family Chore System (Review)

Managing a home, and training children to take care of the home can be a daunting task.   Sometimes you need a little help getting it all worked out.  The Everyday Family Chore System from Everyday Homemaking is a handy tool to help make things run more smoothly, and today I'm sharing a review of how we used this in our home.

We received the e-book version of this product (90 pages).  Included in the book is a Life Skills Checklist (tasks by age), sample daily schedules, printable task cards and blank cards, directions on tasks and various zone cleaning schedules.   Roughly half of the book is instructions/how to, and the other half is printable material.  One thing that I felt was out of place was the "House Rules for Older Girls Still at Home", a one page set of rules for females still living at home, but nowhere is there a list for older males still living at home.

The book is pretty straight forward, with ideas on how to set up a chore schedule, how to implement the schedule and how to train children to have good attitudes and a good work ethic.   The printables make it easy to set up a visual work center that helps everyone see what needs to be done, and by whom.

In looking at the Life Skills Checklist, there are some things to note.  Tasks are put under an age at which they should start learning a skill, then there is an age in parenthesis showing when this should be mastered by.  For example:  Age 5: Clean Toilet (12) means the child should start learning to clean the toilet at 5 and be able to do it independently by age 12.   Not all the things listed apply to all families, and not all the things will work for all kids at the same age, so you need to remember these are suggestions not absolutes.    So even though it says a 13 year old should be able to fill the car with gas, please realize by Federal law you must be 16 to do so.

I liked the idea of Zone Cleaning that was shared.  However it listed 5 zones, then started with zone 3 for a detailed list and never covered any of the others, which left me figuring it out for myself.  So what I did was combined the general idea of zones, made some lists of what I wanted done in each zone and then assigned various tasks to each of us during the day/week.   This seems to be working well.

If you aren't sure where to begin with house keeping, or training your kids in those areas, this is a great resource to help you get a plan in place.   If you're already relatively systematic in your approach, I doubt there's much here you don't already know, but the printables are helpful so you're not recreating the wheel.

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